Quote

On the road halfway between faith and criticism stands the inn of reason. Reason is faith in what can be understood without faith, but it's still a faith, since to understand presupposes that there's something understandable.

Fernando Pessoa

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Fernando Pessoa
Age: 47 †
Born: 1888
Born: June 13
Died: 1935
Died: November 30
Author
Essayist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Translator
Writer
Lisboa
Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa
Fernando Antonio Nogueira Pessoa
Alberto Caeiro
Ricardo Reis
Bernardo Soares
Pessoa
Reason
Criticism
Without
Road
Something
Understood
Presupposes
Since
Inns
Faith
Understandable
Understand
Halfway
Stills
Stands
Still
Philosophical

More quotes by Fernando Pessoa

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As we wash our body so we should wash destiny, change life as we change clothes.
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Time, which grays hair and wrinkles faces, also withers violent affections, and much more quickly.
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I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory.
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To choose ways of not acting was ever the concern and scruple of my life.
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To think is to destroy. The very process of thought indicates it for the same thought, as thinking is decomposing.
Fernando Pessoa
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Isn't joyful or painful this pain in which I rejoice
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Man shouldn't be able to see his own face. That's what's most terrible. Nature gave him the possibility of not seeing it, as well as the incapacity of not seeing his own eyes.
Fernando Pessoa
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The beauty of a naked body is felt only by the dressed races.
Fernando Pessoa
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My soul's the present shadow of a presence gone.
Fernando Pessoa
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Nostalgia! I feel it even for someone who meant nothing to me, out of anxiety for the flight of time and a sickness bred of the mystery of life. If one of the faces I pass daily on the streets disappears, I feel sad yet they meant nothing to me, other than being a symbol of all life.
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It is noble to be shy, illustrious not to know how to act, great not to have a gift for living.
Fernando Pessoa
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I never cared about whatever tragic event happened in China. It's faraway decoration, even if in blood and plague.
Fernando Pessoa
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I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing.
Fernando Pessoa
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If this be to have sense, if to be awake Be but to see this bright, great sleep of things, For the rarer potion mine own dreams I'll take And for truth commune with imaginings
Fernando Pessoa
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Should you ask me if I'm happy, I'll answer that I'm not.
Fernando Pessoa
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What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child. From, The Book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa
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Everyone has his vanity, and each one's vanity is his forgetting that there are others with an equal soul.
Fernando Pessoa
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Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it's all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I'm attending here is a show with another set. And the show I'm attending is myself.
Fernando Pessoa
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We worship perfection because we can't have it if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.
Fernando Pessoa
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To live strikes me as a metaphysical mistake of matter, a dereliction of inaction.
Fernando Pessoa